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What is Symmetric Internet?
Internet speeds continue to increase as technology becomes more advanced. However, ISPs usually focus on providing faster download speeds, but that’s only half of the job. Upload speeds are usually much slower. Symmetric Internet provides the same upload and download speeds. For example, a 500/500 megabit/s (Mbps) connection offers upload and download speeds of 500 Mbps. When upload and download speeds are different, you have asymmetric internet.
Who benefits from symmetric Internet?
>>: Enterprises. Efficient day-to-day business operations rely on fast Internet speeds to process the required amount of data. Companies are sending, uploading and moving more information than ever before. Large files are shared with colleagues to increase collaboration. Employees send emails with large attachments and use cloud applications to upload and download files throughout the day. Point-of-sale systems must process transactions in a timely manner. All of these processes require fast upload speeds and would benefit from a symmetric Internet.
>>: Workers from home. If you work from home, you may need fast Internet speeds, but you may also have other Internet users in your home who take up their share of the upload speed. Participating in online meetings and video calls requires quality upload speeds to be clear and professional for other participants.
>>: Residences with a large number of Internet users/devices. Between the four of us in my house, we have 19 devices for work, school, and personal use. When everyone is at home and online, we put a lot of demand on the network: work, online schoolwork collaboration, gaming, security cameras, mobile devices and other applications. Faster upload speeds give each of our devices the portion of speed we need when we need it.
>>: The students. During the pandemic, remote learning required even more download bandwidth. Taking online classes, collaborating with other students on cloud-based services, and sharing files were important to the learning process. Electronic filing of classwork, projects, and other homework requires good loading speed, especially when deadlines are looming. PDF files, PowerPoint files, and other graphic-heavy uploads can grow very easily. Downloading a 1 gigabyte file on a 10 Mbps download connection takes 15 minutes, while a 300 Mbps download takes only about 30 seconds.
>>: Web content creators. The work of web content creators covers a wide range of projects such as marketing collateral, email marketing, and more. posts, websites, blogs, videos, etc. Each piece of such content must be uploaded. Doing so with a slow upload connection reduces performance.
Which one should I get?
The answer to that question comes down to what you use your internet connection for. For the small number of users who only use it for internet browsing, movie streaming, social media and email, the difference between symmetric and asymmetric speeds will be less noticeable.
Symmetrical speeds give your network the bump it needs for multiple users to hold or attend online meetings, upload files to external servers or video content sites like YouTube, host live broadcasts, and anything else that requires large amounts of data upstream. When there are many people and devices on your network, each takes a portion of the upload speed.
Most businesses can certainly benefit from a symmetric connection, especially as the number of employees on the network increases. For residential users, it depends on how many users and devices you have and how much demand you put on the network.
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Nicolas Theuriet is a product manager at Hawaiian Telcom. Reach him at [email protected]
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